Detitled

offered by fastzen.detitled

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Overview

Show a person's real name rather than their fancy title

"Call each thing by its right name" - Christopher McCandless
McCandless died, probably by starvation, in the Alaskan wilderness. But his legacy continues in Detitled.
What is it?
It's a Chrome extension that parses the current page and attempts to change every person's moniker back to their proper name.
What you talking about?
For example, "The Queen" is converted back to that woman's proper name, "Mrs Elizabeth Windsor".
Why do that?
Removing one of the centuries' old filters that we view and think through.
"Mr President. Ambassador. Admiral. Senator. The honourable. Your honour. Captain. Doctor. These are all titles that capitalism relies on to justify treating some people better than other people." - Matt Stoller
Which sources you using?
Contrived nonsense such as Debretts.
What's an interesting site to view with it?
Try reading "The official website of The British Monarchy" - http://www.royal.gov.uk/HMTheQueen/HMTheQueen.aspx. It makes them sound somewhat mundane and bereft of a certain sparkle.
Where's the data stored?
Here's the raw source: https://fastzen.iriscouch.com:6984/detitled/_design/lookup/_view/titles. It's in CouchDB so you can replicate it and do what you want with it. It also means I can update the source data without you having to do anything.
What's the thinking behind the data?
The lookups are processed sequentially so that "Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother" is identified before "Queen Elizabeth".
Why is this not very good?
* It's slow.
* It's not aware of any historical context so some people will be misidentified.
Really we should be blaming the social system that's designed to obscure and intimidate, rather than a time-poor and skills-challenged programmer.